Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
if the market for this is nanog and you're just looking for smtp/shell surely we can manage this between ourselves without charge (ask your nanog buddy for a shell as a favour).. I know I can and will do this
Well, I do have motives beyond outbound smtp. I actually looked at some of the mail only services, but I really want someplace that will do IMAP and authenticated SMTP. I want to be able to configure how I filter spam, which I don't want to do at the MUA level because I'll need to access mail various ways from various locations. Besides mail, I want to be able to create and control firewall rules on the box. I also want to be able to setup Apache exactly like I want it, etc. And sometimes its nice to have shell access on a machine in a different location for troubleshooting purposes. However, I do like the idea of setting up a community of like minded individuals who would be willing to do secondary MX and/or DNS for each other, and perhaps provide basic shell accounts... On the other hand, I'm a little leary of giving someone I don't know access to one of my boxes. I'm curious how a virtual colocation or dedicated server co-op could work, with values statements on how servers must be run (secure, no SPAM), etc. Would there be member fees? Would members have to democratically vote to let new members in after some kind of vetting process? Would anyone even be interested in such an idea? It would also be interesting to see what kind of monitoring tools could be developed with a diverse set of servers in different parts of the world... could we set up a co-op version of keynote monitoring, where we helped monitor each other?